10 Innovations Making Cities More Fun

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We all know urban life can be a real grind — sometimes it’s hard to stop and smell the roses, let alone admire the art. In cities across the world, people are setting out to change the urban environment, making it more interactive, more fun and sometimes more political as well. Check out some of these fascinating, fun, bizarre, quirky and just plain delicious projects to spark conversations in urban spaces around the world!

1. Playgrounds: Anytime, Anywhere

Dutch designer Thor ter Kulve apparently got tired of looking at boring old city fixtures like fire hydrants and light poles. Everyone passes by them with nary a second thought as fixed elements in the landscape that don’t have much to offer, unless you’re the type who likes bursting into spontaneously choreographed song-and-dance numbers and twirling around lampposts. For the rest of us, though, ter Kulve came up with a quirky idea: why not turn them into a playground? A lamppost becomes a swing, a fire hydrant a fountain and your imagination is the limit.

2. Public Fruit Park

Raise your hands if you’ve ever picked your own fruit and eaten it right there, juices dripping off your hands in the summer heat. Fresh-picked fruit is the best, and picking your own is even better. Sadly, for a lot of people in urban environments, that’s not an experience that happens too often, unless they happen to have fruit trees or an urban fruit map (yes, these are a thing, and your city may have one!). One Los Angeles neighborhood set out to change that, however, with the city’s first public fruit park. In cooperation with the city, an organization called Fallen Fruit established the orchard, distributed fruit trees to the community, and encouraged public involvement in the orchard/art installation.

3. Giant Inflatable Rubber Duckies

Bathtub duckies looked so much bigger when we were little. Now that we’re all grown up, they seem pretty minuscule, but there’s still something endearingly, enduringly childlike about them. Except maybe in Hong Kong, where Florentijn Hofman’s 54 foot inflatable duck majestically sat upon the waters for a while, attracting the ire of the Chinese Communist Party in the process. There’s something about seeing a cartoonishly large inflatable duck in an unexpected locale that puts a grin on my face — I don’t know about you!

4. Park(ing)

So much space in cities across the world is dedicated to cars. On Park(ing) Day, citizens strike back, taking over metered parking spaces to turn them into microcosmic parks as a way of bringing together communities, making a comment on urban environments, and, oh yeah, having fun. Some parks are decorated with plants and a few chairs, others might house a mobile chicken coop, others have people offering free knitting classes or teaching people how to make jam. You never know what you might learn about your own community on a Park(ing) Day.

5. Interactive Public Art

Like Photophore, this display interacts with particpants.

Last November, a building in Frankfurt hosted a stunning light display controlled not by a single artist, or by an automated system, but by anyone who wanted to interact with it. Smartphone users could change and manipulate the lights with gestures on their phones, turning it into a cooperative and constantly-changing art project. Photophore, as it was called, is similar to other urban light displays that have relied on user feedback to turn them into an expression of community-based art and expression.